1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to wireless communication systems and more particularly to long training sequences of minimum peak-to-average power ratio which may be used by legacy systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Each wireless communication device participating in wireless communications includes a built-in radio transceiver (i.e., receiver and transmitter) or is coupled to an associated radio transceiver. As is known to those skilled in the art, the transmitter typically includes a data modulation stage, one or more intermediate frequency stages, and a power amplifier. The data modulation stage converts raw data into baseband signals in accordance with a particular wireless communication standard. The intermediate frequency stages mix the baseband signals with one or more local oscillations to produce RF signals. The power amplifier amplifies the RF signals prior to transmission via an antenna.
The receiver is typically coupled to the antenna and includes a low noise amplifier, one or more intermediate frequency stages, a filtering stage, and a data recovery stage. The low noise amplifier receives, via the antenna, inbound RF signals and amplifies the inbound RF signals. The intermediate frequency stages mix the amplified RF signals with one or more local oscillations to convert the amplified RF signal into baseband signals or intermediate frequency (IF) signals. The filtering stage filters the baseband signals or the IF signals to attenuate unwanted out of band signals to produce filtered signals. The data recovery stage recovers raw data from the filtered signals in accordance with a particular wireless communication standard.
Different wireless devices in a wireless communication system may be compliant with different standards or different variations of the same standard. For example, 802.11a an extension of the 802.11 standard, provides up to 54 Mbps in the 5 GHz band. 802.11b, another extension of the 802.11 standard, provides 11 Mbps transmission (with a fallback to 5.5, 2 and 1 Mbps) in the 2.4 GHz band. 802.11g, another extension of the 802.11 standard, provides 20+ Mbps in the 2.4 GHz band. 802.11n, a new extension of 802.11, is being developed to address, among other thins, higher throughput and compatibility issues. An 802.11a compliant communications device may reside in the same WLAN as a device that is compliant with another 802.11 standard. When devices that are compliant with multiple versions of the 802.11 standard are in the same WLAN, the devices that are compliant with older versions are considered to be legacy devices. To ensure backward compatibility with legacy devices, specific mechanisms must be employed to insure that the legacy devices know when a device that is compliant with a newer version of the standard is using a wireless channel to avoid a collision. New implementations of wireless communication protocol enable higher speed throughput, while also enabling legacy devices which might be only compliant with 802.11a or 802.11g to communicate in systems which are operating at higher speeds.
Devices implementing both the 802.11a and 802.11g standards use an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) encoding scheme. OFDM is a frequency division multiplexing modulation technique for transmitting large amounts of digital data over a radio wave. OFDM works by spreading a single data stream over a band of sub-carriers, each of which is transmitted in parallel. In 802.11a and 802.11g compliant devices, only 52 of the 64 active sub-carriers are used. Four of the active sub-carriers are pilot sub-carriers that the system uses as a reference to disregard frequency or phase shifts of the signal during transmission. The remaining 48 sub-carriers provide separate wireless pathways for sending information in a parallel fashion. The 52 sub-carriers are modulated using binary or quadrature phase shift keying (BPSK/QPSK), 16 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM), or 64 QAM. Therefore, 802.11a and 802.11g compliant devices use sub-carriers −26 to +26, with the 0-index sub-carrier set to 0 and 0-index sub-carrier being the carrier frequency. As such, only part of the 20 Mhz bandwidth supported by 802.11a and 802.11g is use.
In 802.11a/802.11g, each data packet starts with a preamble which includes a short training sequence followed by a long training sequence. The short and long training sequences are used for synchronization between the sender and the receiver. The long training sequence of 802.11a and 802.11g is defined such that each of sub-carriers −26 to +26 has one BPSK consellation point, either +1 or −1.
There exists a need to create a long training sequence of minimum peak-to-average ratio that uses more sub-carriers without interfering with adjacent channels. The inventive long trains sequence with a minimum peak-to-average power ratio should be usable by legacy devices in order to estimate channel impulse response and to estimate carrier frequency offset between a transmitter and a receiver.